


She's a Cruel Mistress (And the Bargain Must Be Made)

by Chaerring



Series: Your Songs Remind Me Of Swimming [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: But he wasn't always, Completely Gen how did that happen?, Gen, Gerard is a bag of dicks, Minor Character Death, The Argents have always been crazy, Underage character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-27
Updated: 2012-08-27
Packaged: 2017-11-12 23:36:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/496928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/pseuds/Chaerring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the sun began to set, the older hunters, family members, and others from the area ushered them into an old hotel building. They bunked with just one other man their own age; Gerard and Bertrand insisted they would be partners. His brother was a year older than he was, but he had held himself back waiting a year for Gerard to join him in training. They were determined to carry on their family’s legacy together with honor and success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She's a Cruel Mistress (And the Bargain Must Be Made)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting on this series!
> 
> Special thanks to TheGreatSporkWielder for betaing and putting up with my whining over fucking Gerard.

Gerard looks at Allison and sees weakness. It’s not her fault. By herself she practically overflows with potential and talent. She’s a culmination of his entire life’s work and his son has let her waste herself on idiotic passing teenage frivolities. It’s such a change from they way his mother had taught him.

He doesn’t approve of the changes made in the last decade to the training of hunters, especially not the change in the men’s curriculum. Christopher’s generation had been the last to be forced to understand the seriousness of their work. The old methods had weeded out the weak before they could abandon the cause or get someone killed. Nowadays hunters ran the risk of boys that can’t follow orders or other that freeze up at the sight of a monster joining the cause without being properly tested. They ended up getting good experienced men killed, or worse, letting the monster escape. He wished he could put them all through the kind of test he and his brother were challenged with.

It had begun as a beach trip, what they thought was a celebration of their readiness to join the hunt. There were fourteen of them there, aged sixteen to eighteen, thinking that they were the most skillful men in the world, having survived the tests when over twice their number had dropped out. At the time he should have notice the grim look in his mother’s eyes. He learned after that to pay attention, though. 

As the sun began to set, the older hunters, family members, and others from the area ushered them into an old hotel building. They bunked with just one other man their own age; Gerard and Bertrand insisted they would be partners. His brother was a year older than he was, but he had held himself back waiting a year for Gerard to join him in training. They were determined to carry on their family’s legacy together with honor and success. 

Their mother explained the trial to the entire group, because the Argent women had been nothing except flawless leaders for centuries. Some of the girls they had met in school wished they were boys, limited as the fairer sex was to the rest of the world. Gerard and Bertrand used to spend quiet rainy nights in hotels whispering about what they would be like as women. Blanche Argent had never let the world’s perceptions about her sex interfere with her job. She used to refer to the assumptions outsiders made about her strength and abilities as a useful cloak, a red herring, she could use to gain information another man wouldn’t have been granted. 

The instructions of the surprise trial were simple. They were given two sets of small plastic plugs to go in their ears. At the time, they were something new. None of the boys or men there to be tested were familiar with them. They were instructed how to use the plugs and they practised, both putting them in their own ears and their partners. If the more experienced hunters hadn’t been so serious about the whole thing, Gerard knew it could have devolved into a mess of jokes and returned to the jovial atmosphere found on the beach earlier in the day. 

Instead, they were bundled off in twos to their rooms. The glass had been removed from their sea facing window leaving the breeze blowing freely in and the salty scent of the water to permeate their air. Gerard distinctly remembers Bertrand moving to inspect the window as he turned back to see their mother closing the door.

“I’ll return in the morning.”

Her words were quiet and final. Even the lock of the door and her retreating footsteps were louder than her voice had been. Later, Gerard will know to pay attention when he mother becomes that quiet. He’ll know to heed the sinking feeling of his stomach hitting his feet, but then, at sixteen, he hadn’t known anything at all. 

Gerard joined Bertrand at the window watching the stars get brighter in the vast expanse of sky over the ocean.

“Plugs for our ears. What do you suppose we need them for, Bert?”

His older brother shrugged looking far out over the ocean.

“Wear them, I guess.”

Gerard pushed the plastic things into his ears like they had just been taught and looked over at his brother, who had made no move to do the same. He was squinting at something in the distance, something Gerard couldn’’t spot in the dark. Bertrand frowned and opened his mouth to speak, then glanced back to see that Gerard had the plugs in. Bert rolled his eyes and Gerard could feel his brother’s hands on his shoulders steering him, centered on the window and pointing out across the sea to an outcropping of rocks only a little ways further away from where the older hunters had spent their day while the new recruits had celebrated.

There was something--No, _someone_ moving on the rocks. The steps the person took were odd and for a few moments, as his eyes tried to adjust to the figure, Gerard thought it was a beach bum, a homeless person come to collect their glass soda bottles for money wrapped in a large coat. It was a whole minute later, as he watched, before the figure reached the end of the outcropping and suddenly stretched out its body. 

Abruptly, Gerard had to quell the sudden contradictory feelings in his chest. His teenage libido responded almost instantaneously to the sight of the monster’s obviously female body even from that distance, but his mother’s teachings were so ingrained in him that the wings and odd perched way her feet rest on the rocks repulsed him in the same moment. Her hair was so black it seemed to be lit from behind by the meager light of stars and Gerard felt like she was looking into their window specifically. She opened her mouth and Gerard felt the hairs on his uncovered skin stand to attention, but he didn’t hear anything. 

He felt Bertrand move next to him and he assumed his brother was inserting the ear plugs into his ears. Unfortunately, his assumption was entirely wrong and Bertrand was swinging himself through the glassless window. Gerard lunged, trying to grip his older brother’s arm, but Bert had a year of growth, a year of training on him and it wasn’t hard for him to toss Gerard back into the room as he hit the sand and began to run. 

A flash of panic bloomed in Gerard’s chest and he threw himself out the window. He knew he could bring Bert down and at least delay him if he could just get close enough to tackle his legs. Running in the deep beach sand wasn’t something he was used to, though. All of their training had been for the forests, the mountains and sometimes the snow. It didn’t seem to matter to Bert, who was almost flying across the beach towards the creature on the rocks. 

Gerard was still yards behind when his brother hit the water and began throwing himself towards the tall rocks where she- _it_ was perched. The tide was coming in, waves breaking against the outcropping and surging around it with the ancient force of the ocean. It was eerily silent as he watched the water roll with the plugs in his ears. He splashed into the water, struggling to follow Bert in the sea. He was tired from the day’s celebrations and had never spent much time in an ocean to begin with. The Argents were inland people, not coastal.

The water rushed out from around his legs turning shallow and making him look away from Bert, away from the creature for just a moment. There was a wave coming, larger than the others. He turned back and kept moving, trying desperately to reach Bert. Surely there was some way he could pull them around a rock or into a curve and avoid the danger, but he was too far away. 

Abruptly, he felt attention on him and looked up into the monster’s eyes. They were remote and grey, swirling and so far above him, like a storm. She closed her mouth, and she smiled. The entire world seemed to go still and Gerard craned his neck every which way trying to find Bert. He couldn’t see his brother anywhere. He struggled, pulling himself onto one of the rocks as the large wave bore down on him. He screamed, but the sound didn’t seem to go farther than his own ears ricocheting around behind his eyes in his own mind. His arms fastened themselves around the rock and he squeezed his eyes shut. The water hit him harder than anything he had ever felt and he clung to the rock feeling as it sliced into his skin and the salt stung impossibly. 

He prayed endlessly that Bertrand was doing the same somewhere nearby as his head was covered in water and his head began to ache with the effort of not breathing. He was just about to open his mouth, ready to take a breath and give in when the water retreated back to his chest and he gasped. He called for his brother and crawled to higher ground, hating the limitations of his body. 

Blanche found him the next morning, waking him by pulling the plugs from his ears and turning him over to clean and bandage the cuts from the rocks marring his limbs. 

“You did well, Gerard.”

It seemed a simple praise, but to him it meant everything, only for a second.  
“Bertrand failed, and lost his life. That is what happens when we fail. If not our own life, then the life of our partner. He could have failed you as much as he failed himself.”

Gerard’s eyes closed and he took a deep breath, reading between the lines. _You failed him, and so he failed himself, as well._ He thought about storm grey eyes and the sting of salt in his eyes, the eerie silence of the plugs and the way Bertrand had suddenly disappeared from his sight in a brief instance.

“I understand.”

He knew his mother heard: _It will never happen again._

Forty-five years later, when he comes across a woman with midnight hair in a forest, he knows her instantly. From his pocket he draws a cracked plastic set of earplugs, and from his shoulder he draws his sword.

**Author's Note:**

> Next up: a Further Away from the Shore chapter.


End file.
